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Howell: Second-guessing Bobby De Niro at Cannes

Is Robert De Niro talking to us, his fellow jurors or only to himself, as he ponders which film at Cannes 64 should get the Palme d&rsquo;Or?

Jury president Robert de Niro: a Godfather boss or an Analyze This one? (YVES HERMAN / REUTERS)

Thu., May 19, 2011

CANNES, FRANCE

The same question pops into my mind at the conclusion of every competition film screening at the current Cannes Film Festival: “What would Bobby think?”

I’m referring to actor Robert De Niro, the president of the nine-member jury that must decide which of 20 films will get the Palme d’Or and other prizes come Sunday, when the 64th edition of the Cannes fest finally turns off the projector.

It’s the most common of parlour games here to try to second-guess the Palme jury. Journalists do it in straw polls published daily in trade magazines, which are examined as closely as the Dead Sea Scrolls for possible clues to the prizes. The most recent one, by Screen International, shows the comedy Le Havre by Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki barely edging the drama The Kid With a Bike by Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

De Niro’s fellow jurors include three other actors — Jude Law, Uma Thurman and Argentina’s Martina Gusman — so it’s tempting to think that films with strong thespian turns will sway the Palmes. (The other five jurors are filmmakers Olivier Assayas, Johnnie To and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, writer/critic Linn Ullmann and producer Nansun Shi.)

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Equally seductive is the notion that De Niro rules the panel with an iron fist, not unlike his famous gangster characters in The Godfather 2 or Goodfellas. He always seems like a guy who takes no guff, although in Analyze This (and Analyze That) he played a mobster who wasn’t so sure of himself. Is he a Godfather boss or an Analyze This one?

De Niro also seems like a guy who doesn’t have much patience for the art films that tend to rule Cannes. He reportedly turned down the male lead role in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, an extremely brainy film that competed for the Palme at Cannes 63, so he could continue making profitable junk like Little Fockers, in which he goofed about having an unwelcome erection.

What’s going through Bobby’s mind, as he watches challenging and brainy material like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia or Joseph Cedar’s Footnote? Is he yawning, frowning, drumming his fingers?

He didn’t give much indication at the annual meet-the-jury session last week: “It’s all up for grabs at this point. Who knows?” he said, not eager to be pressed about his criteria for judging films.

My gut tells me that De Niro and his actor friends will feel more comfortable with Le Havre, The Kid with a Bike, Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist or Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam than with more substantial fare like The Tree of Life, which at this point would be my personal pick for the Palme. (I’d also give Le Havre the second-place Grand Prix, and a jury prize to The Artist. But just like those jurors, there are still more films to see and more time to change my mind.)

Two more competition films screened Thursday, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. The former is a kinky sci-fi excursion by the always interesting Almodovar that I don’t see De Niro enjoying one bit. The latter is a Hollywood-set thriller starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan and Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks that looks like it would be up De Niro’s alley.

But I could be way off with such thinking, and I probably am. Cannes is a place where the unexpected often happens.

De Niro may be thinking he needs to atone for the many bad movies he’s made in recent years, which have started to make us forget the many great movies he made near the start of his career, several decades ago.

One of those bad movies was What Just Happened, which closed Cannes in 2008, in which De Niro plays a stressed-out Hollywood producer. The film, part of which is set at the Cannes Film Festival, ends with him being abandoned on the tarmac at nearby Nice International Airport. Maybe he needs to salute an art film to redeem his career or save his soul.

Perhaps, like his pugilist character Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, De Niro feels a reckoning coming on: “I’ve done a lot of bad things, Joey. Maybe it’s comin’ back to me. Who knows? I’m a jinx maybe. Who the hell knows?”

Who the hell knows, indeed, about what De Niro and his jurors are really thinking?

Only one thing is certain at this point: Von Trier’s sci-fi melodrama Melancholia is highly unlikely to win anything, owing to the director’s hateful pro-Nazi comments made at his Wednesday news conference.

Despite von Trier’s semi apology the same day, Cannes officials met Thursday in an extraordinary meeting to declare the Danish filmmaker persona non grata at the fest, a ruling that may not directly involve his film, but will doubtless have a strong impact on the jury.

GOSLING’S IN OVERDRIVE: The talk of Cannes Thursday night was Ryan Gosling’s leap to bona fide action star, following the explosive world premiere of Drive, a thriller directed by Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn.

The Ontario-born Gosling plays a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals.

The film plays like a hybrid of Taxi Driver, Bullitt and Dirty Harry, with Gosling stepping up his game as a credible action hero in the speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick mold of Clint Eastwood or De Niro.

Watching Drive in the Debussy Theatre was a real tonic for a fest that had seemed to forgotten about the sheer pleasure of movies, owing to the uproar over the off-screen idiocy of another Danish director, von Trier.

The casting is great overall, but another brilliant stroke is the choice of funnyman Albert Brooks as a brutal L.A. dealmaker.

Drive opens Sept. 16, and you have to think it will likely have a big hello at TIFF before that. But be warned: it burns much blood along with rubber.

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